


american girl

by CeruleanTactician



Category: The Godfather (1972 1974 1990), The Godfather - Mario Puzo
Genre: 3 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, POV Female Character, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CeruleanTactician/pseuds/CeruleanTactician
Summary: Kay goes back to New Hampshire, but Michael never comes back for her. Their lives remain separate. That is, for the most part.Or: three times Kay and Michael's lives intersect, after.
Relationships: Apollonia Vitelli/Michael Corleone, Kay Adams/Douglas Michelson, Kay Adams/Michael Corleone
Comments: 9
Kudos: 40





	american girl

i.

_1949_

Kay supposes, later, that if their college boyfriend fled the country because of a double murder charge, most girls would quietly move on and try to forget the whole affair. But Kay called the house in Long Island, wrote letters, and bothered Tom Hagen with all the fervor of a twenty year old girl who’d fallen in love for the first time.

In the end, Mrs. Corleone- who’d told Kay to call her Mama- is the only one who has the decency to write Kay that Michael had married. They’d made quite a pair as they corresponded infrequently over those three years, with the occasional phone call. Kay felt an odd sort of kinship with the kind old Sicilian woman. She had lived a completely different life than Kay. Mama Corleone was always sincere, but she also had a sense of humor that sometimes surprised Kay. There was a passiveness there that was foreign to her, sure, but there was also an inner strength and devotion that made her believe that this was the woman who raised Michael Corleone.

Kay had kept herself busy- she had graduated from Dartmouth, got a job at an elementary school near her parents' house. And it’s not like she’d remained a chaste maiden waiting for her lover to return to her for the whole three years. But Kay hadn’t pursued anything serious, and she knew the reason why. Not for her parents’ lack of encouragement. She was their only child, after all. Her father especially seemed to find the idea of a spinster schoolteacher daughter offensive.

She and Michael talked about their future together so many times. She had names in her head for their future children. Michael had practically proposed to her at his sister’s wedding, dragging her into the family portrait like that. She could still remember him taking her hand, lightly pulling her along. Kay had been embarrassed, outwardly protested, but she’d secretly been delighted.

She felt humiliated now, though. What did she expect? For him to come back, years later, and beg for her to take him back. Ha. Like Michael would ever beg for anything. And then what? Could she really pretend that he hadn’t been in hiding somewhere because he’d been accused of committing a double homicide? Pretend that the FBI hadn’t come to her house and talked to her _parents_?

(Kay could have pretended. She could have converted to Catholicism, been a good wife. For him, she knows she could have.)

There's relief too, though. There’s a sense of finality in the letter, a resolution to the sad story of the first boy she fell in love with and got stuck on. Kay thinks about a boy her mother tried to set her up with, Jacob from her high school, who became a mechanic after he got back from the war. She should call him again.

(And she does. It doesn’t stop her from crying her eyes out that night, but she puts on her best for the date that weekend.)

Mama Corleone gets a polite and appropriately grateful letter from Kay a week later. But Mrs. Corleone never writes back again.

* * *

ii.

_1959_

“Hon, could you get me a-” Her husband glances at the drink in her outstretched hand with a befuddled look on his face. Kay tilts her head, slightly. Jacob grins at her.

“Thanks.” He takes the drink.

“I like to think I know you a little after eight years of marriage,” she says lightly, leaning on the arm of his chair.

“I guess you do. You wanna watch? They’ve got some Mafia thing on,” he says as he looks back at the television set.

Jacob is so focused on the television that he doesn’t see the way his wife’s face falls when she looks at the screen.

Michael looks the same. It’s been fourteen years since she saw him, but he looks the same. The blurry, black and white picture doesn’t capture him well enough, but she can tell. And there’s his almost-brother Tom Hagen next to him. She only met him in person twice.

Directly behind him sits a beautiful Italian-looking woman with long dark hair who is almost certainly his wife. Two somber looking children sit beside her.

Without looking away, Kay walks wordlessly to the television and dials up the volume.

“ _-I have appeared before this committee and given it all the cooperation in my power. I find it a great dishonor for me personally to have to deny that I am a criminal-_ ” says Michael. It has been fifteen years since she heard his voice. She puts her hand to her mouth without conscious thought. Somehow, she had expected him to sound different.

“What?” says Jacob, with humor in his voice. “This gangster remind you of that boy from Dartmouth you were with?”

Kay had told Jacob, early on, a sanitized version of her time with Michael. He’d been more enchanted that his girl had gone to school at a place like Dartmouth more than anything else. But she had never told him Michael’s name, she remembers now. 

“I suppose,” she says. She touches her wedding ring with her other hand, unconsciously.

“I guess you’re thanking your lucky stars you never married him.”

The mock-insecure, humorous tone in her husband’s voice doesn’t fail to bring a slight smile to her face.

“I don’t know,” she teases. “I could’ve made a pretty good gangster’s wife.”

(She only feels a slight stab of irrational guilt for calling Michael a gangster. She remembers how certain he had seemed at his sister's wedding that he was nothing like the rest of his family.)

“Believe me, hon,” says Jacob. “No, you wouldn’t have.”

(He _is_ right about that.)

She follows the news on the Corleone case for weeks after that. Jacob either doesn’t notice or doesn’t ask. She gets a copy of _The New York Post_ every day and reads with a horrified fascination, trying to square the two images in her mind: the boy she met at Dartmouth, who'd had real tears in his eyes when he told her about what he’d seen during the war. On the other hand, the Mafia boss apparently involved in gambling, drugs, prostitution and dozens of murders. Eventually, the news finds something else to talk about. 

But Michael is never arrested, much less goes to prison, despite how guilty he'd looked with that stunt on the television. Michael Corleone stops making the front page, and soon enough no one is talking about him at all.

Kay wonders, absently, if that means he won.

* * *

iii.

_1979_

Jacob dies some ten odd years later, with a loving wife and two children (Mary and Jake Jr.) by his side. Kay goes back to working at the school, and she’s happy there. She meets Douglas Michelson many years into her widowhood. He’s a divorcé, and a lawyer, but no one’s perfect. He takes her on a business trip to New York two years after their marriage. It’s the first time she’s been back since 1945. 

(“Jesus, Kay,” Doug had said. “You live in New Hampshire, not Antarctica. You’ve only been to New York City once in your life?”)

The city is different, but there’s enough familiarity to a city two young college students ran around in to stop her in her tracks a couple of times. After seeing the sights for a few days, her husband decides to take Kay to a party.

“It’s a charity the firm has done some work with. The Corleone Foundation- funded by the mob, allegedly, but it does legitimate work,” he said, and he doesn’t see the way she freezes. She had told him the sad story of her sophomore year of college, when she dated (when she fell in love with) a future Mafia boss. It always gets a laugh, a New England schoolteacher and a Don. But, as with Jacob, Kay never said his name.

“Sounds fun,” she says.

It is, of course, a nice party. The nicest she's ever been to, probably, considering a normal event for her is usually organized by the PTA. Johnny Fontane, of all people, is singing at the event, which isn't actually a surprise, but makes Kay grin. She walks with her husband, feeling out of place and underdressed, though she's wearing her Sunday best. After, Doug wanders off to speak with some colleagues, so Kay is by herself, feeling a little lost when-

“Kay Adams?” says a voice that is somehow still familiar, 35 years later.

“It’s Michelson, now, actually.” Kay says, an automatic response, before her brain can catch up to her. She freezes and blinks. 

“Michael?” she says softly.

“God, Kay. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” Michael Corleone smiles slightly, and it looks real enough. She wonders if he meant to call out to her like that, or if he had just saw her and it came out without him meaning to.

“You look wonderful,” he says to her silence. Kay find herself smiling, genuinely flattered. It's nice to hear, for all she knows that she’s not 20 anymore.

“You too, Michael.” she manages to say once she recovers. He’s different. Not just in looks (he’s still handsome, though, in an older dignified way) but in mannerisms. There’s a somewhat relaxed, jovial air to him that the young, self-serious Michael rarely had.

(Later, she would realize that there’s a slight edge of _menace_ to this persona that the young Michael hadn’t had either.)

“So, what’re you doing here? How have you been?” he says. Kay blinks. Even with him standing right in front of her, she can't reconcile the images- her first love, Mafia boss, war hero, alleged _murderer_. He certainly looked the part of a kindly charity founder, now.

She is unsure of if she wants this conversation to continue or if she wants to vanish at the first opportunity. But she'd agreed to come to the party- _his_ foundation's party. What had she been expecting?

“My husband, Douglas, he’s done some legal work for the Foundation. I- I’ve been well, Michael,” she says.

“Good. Here- Freddie! You remember Fredo- ah, I can never get his attention. Well, he’s over there,” Michael says, gesturing vaguely in his brother’s direction. Kay can see an older man in a brightly colored suit across the room, talking animatedly with two women. Her gaze returns to Michael and she wonders if he’s nervous, or if she's just projecting.

"Yes, of course. I remember," says Kay. She does actually remember him. Of all the men she'd met at Connie Corleone's wedding all those years ago, somehow the man who had been visibly drunk an hour in at his own sister's wedding stuck out in her mind. By comparison, the criminals and murderers had all seemed perfectly polite.

Just then, a woman walks up to them. She’s older, but beautiful in an almost regal manner.

“Ah, Apollonia. Kay, this is my wife, Apollonia. Apollonia, this is Kay Michelson. She and I went to Dartmouth together.” Michael gestures her forward, still smiling.

Kay wonders if Apollonia believes the polite lie. She wonders if they still have Connie's wedding photo in their house. She wonders if anyone ever told her who the woman by Michael’s side was. She wonders if Apollonia recognizes her. But she doubts it.

“A pleasure,” says Apollonia, with only the slightest trace of an accent that reminds Kay of Mama Corleone.

Kay nods politely, "Likewise."

“Michael, I came to tell you that Tom is going to be leaving early to meet Vinnie,” says Apollonia in a low voice to her husband. She pronounces her husband’s name like _Michele_.

Michael’s pleasant facade flickers slightly.

“Could you tell him to wait at the hotel? I'll be over after.” he says, with a slightly apologetic tone in his voice.

“Of course,” she nods. "Excuse me."

Kay and Michael watch her go.

“It is good to see you,” he says, his gaze on her again. "We should catch up."

A part of Kay wants to be angry at him. She is still a little angry at him, leaving her without a word. And three years of fruitless waiting can take a bitter toll. But decades have come and gone, and she’s not that lonely, lovestruck girl anymore. Kay has had two good husbands and two good children. And she’s nostalgic and, frankly, more than a little curious. 

It might be the same wicked fascination she felt when Michael told her that terrible story about his father at his sister’s wedding all those years ago, but it’s still there. She can give him a conversation. Can't she?

“We should,” she says.

“Cake?” he offers and Kay thinks that’s as close to an apology as she’s ever going to get.


End file.
